No detail of his arrest and charge is available yet. Michael had 5 min. of fame on this CNN interview. Let's all wish him triumph over hard time and trying time.

currently reading 'The Ominous Parallels' by Leonard Peikoff. A brilliant study of America Today - and the 'ominous parallels' with the chaos of pre-hitler Germany. copyright 1982.

"If you do not wish to be a victim of today's philosophical bankruptcy, I recommend 'The Ominous Parallels as protection and ammunition. It will protect you from supporting, unwittingly the ideas that are destroying you and the world ... This book and its author will be part of tomorrow's cultural mainstream..."

p114.
Love's paradoxes.
CHAUCER How acurate is this CHAUCER's middle english translation of original Italian? Is there a middle Italian?

If no love is, O god, what fele I so?
And if love is, what thing and whiche is he?
If love be good, from whennes comth my wo?
If it be wikke, a wonder thinketh me,
When every torment and adversitee
That cometh of him, may to me savory thinke;
For ay thurst I, the more that I it drinke.

And if that at myn owene lust I brenne,
Fro Whennes cometh my wailing and my pleynte?
If harme agree me, wher-to pleyne I thenne?
I noot, ne why unwery that I feynte.
O quike deeth, o swete harm so queynte,
How may of thee in me swich quantitee,
But-if that I consente that it be?

And if that I consente, I wrongfully
Compleyne, y-wis; thus possed to and fro,
Al sterelees with-inne a boot am I
A-mid the see, by-twixen windes two,
That in contrarie stonden ever-mo.
Allas! what is this ownder maladye?
For hete of cold, for cold of hete, I dye.

Marxism in Modern France
by George Lichtheim
Columbia, 212 pp., $6.75 reviewed here
I guess Fidel Castro is the oldest living communist. Nope. Chairman Mao's favorite American is older than Mr. Castro. Wow, is lady 叶曼 still believe in the ruling party of mainland China ?

It is sweet to dance to violins
When Love and Life are fair:
To dance to flutes, to dance to lutes,
Is delicate and rare:
But it is not sweet with nimble feet
To dance upon the air!

And as one sees most fearful things
In the crystal of a dream,
We saw the greasy hempen rope
Hooked to the blackened beam
And heard the prayer the hangman's snare
Strangled into a scream.

And all the woe that moved him so
That he gave that bitter cry,
And the wild regrets, and the bloody sweats,
None knew so well as I:
For he who lives more lives than one
More deaths than one must die.

The Chaplain would not kneel to pray
By his dishonoured grave:
Nor mark it with that blessed Cross
That Christ for sinners gave,
Because the man was one of those
Whom Christ came down to save.
...
This too I know - and wise were it
If each could know the same --
That every prison that men build
Is built with bricks of shame,
And bound with bars lest Christ should see
How men their brothers maim.

With bars they blur the gracious moon,
And blind the goodly sun:
And they do well to hide their Hell,
For in it things are done
That Son of God nor son of man
Ever should look upon!

The vilest deeds like poison weeds
Bloom well in prison-air:
It is only what is good in Man
That wastes and withers there:
Pale Anguish keeps the heavy gate,
And the Warder is Despair.
................
And he of the swollen purple throat,
And the stark and staring eyes,
Waits for the holy hands that took
The Thief to Paradise;
And a broken and a contrite heart
The Lord will not despise.

When speaking of him later about this poem I remember assuming that his prison experiences must have helped him to realise the suffering of the condemned soldier and certainly lent passion to his verse. But he would not hear of it.
"Oh, no Frank," he cried, "never; my experiences in prison were too horrible, too painful to be used. I simply blotted them out altogether and refused to recall them."

"What about the verse?" I asked:

"We sewed the sacks, we broke the stones,
We turned the dusty drill:
We banged the tins, and bawled the hymns,
And sweated on the mill:
And in the heart of every man
Terror was lying still."

"Characteristic details, Frank, merely the decor of prison life, not its reality; that no one could paint, not even Dante, who had to turn away his eyes from lesser sufferings."

And with tears of blood he cleansed the hand,
The hand that held the steel:
For only blood can wipe out blood,
And only tears can heal:
And the crimson stain that was of Cain
Became Christ's snow-white seal.

This is the highest height Oscar Wilde ever reached, and alas! he only trod the summit for a moment...He was by nature as a pagan who for a few months became a Christian, but to live as a lover of Jesus was impossible to this "Greek born out of due time", and he never even dreamed of a reconciling synthesis...

I wish fsf campaign manager Matt Lee could have been more considerate on preserving individual advogato-afficiado's overview of other voices expressed through equal spacing of http://advogato.org/recentlog.html.

And why I can't even pick individual diary entry to read on the right column? ok. i see. i may have to give up old habit of daily digesting recentlog.html